Stories…
This week I stood in a sun-soaked dining room with a tiny wedding reception all held captive by the way the bride’s father wove each and every person around the table into a beautiful story of a family joined and doubled in one pure lovefest of a day. I don’t think I was the only one surprised at how connected everyone was, even before they came together. They were all little things -inconsequential on their own, but together they built up into a fascinating and touching narrative. Notes had been scribbled for hours, thoughts as they occurred – things as they were noticed.
True story-telling is just that, it’s about noticing. Seeing people for who they really are, seeing connections, linking and creating new stories from old.
I want so much to be able to tell those kinds of stories, the kinds of stories that keep on being told years afterwards. Where the colours and the details fade but the emotions and connections live strong.
It’s all about the stories in my world lately, I haven’t lived so many of own in the last while and if I think about it too much, it makes me a little sad. But I’ve been living in other stories a lotttt.
Sometimes the purest downtime is in books; diving headfirst for even half an hour into someone else’s life, a precious little breather. A little dip into another world to bring me back to my own.
Stories. Thinking about how they work, what they mean to us and how we can tell them well. And as I think on all this, what I’m really thinking about is how I tell my stories through photos and how I can make it … more. As a photographer, the most valuable skill I have is my ability to notice things – and I need to keep it strong.
I need to keep that muscle toned, so I’m about to embark on a new story-telling adventure. I realised that I hadn’t done much in the way of personal photographic work lately and it’s time to remedy that. I put down on paper what I wanted to do, and then, somehow, because the world sometimes works that way, my project came to me. That same day. How cool is that little bit of the story? I’m excited about what we’re going to do with it…
